suppression of year

cbrylla

Hi, I know this has been asked before, but a really important feature would be the ability to suppress the year when citing page numbers only. For example:

As Highmore (2000) suggests, bla bla bla bla (p. 23). Further, it can only be bla bla bla (p. 28).

I just had to change a long manuscript from Harvard to MLA, and I had to remove a lot of the "p." in those instances. Even if styles don't have to be changed, this would be very useful, since it would make it easier to change the source, if necessary.

Is there any way this could be done in the next version?

Other than that, I love the new Zotero version, especially the new quick view of adding citations.

bwiernik

This change requires not only changes to Zotero, but also to CSL, the programming language that Zotero uses to format citations. Adding support for Author (Year) style citations requires deciding exactly how this should work, rewriting many styles, and changing programs like Zotero. So it will take a substantial amount of time unfortunately.

adamsmith

no, the request here is different. It's not the Author (year) part but the just the page number (i.e. no year, no author) part.

Easier to do, but I'm not sure about it -- the difference is just the p., right?.

cbrylla

adamsmith, precisely. The difference is just the "p.", but as I had to do them manually in Harvard (as I cannot suppress the year in Z), when I changed to MLA I had to manually remove all the "p."s

As there is a ticking box for "suppress author", I don't see why there cannot be an additional box "suppress year". Surely, the metalinks that are not visible can still be maintained? Sorry, I have no idea about the programming language, but I do wonder what Zotero users do when they want just the page number. Do they do it manually?

adamsmith

Yes, standard is to do this manually.
The technology is indeed not terribly complex, I think the concern would be more with overloading the GUI and with how to handle edge cases, e.g. styles that don't allow just page numbers or numerical styles.

cbrylla

I see your point, but given that MLA and Harvard use this technique quite a lot (only the page number in consecutive citations from the same source) it would be a big time saver. As there is already a quick view to add sources, I don't think one more tick box in the classical view would matter much. It would also help with edited collections or monograph manuscripts that need to be quickly converted to house styles.

Anyway, it would be good to know what other users think.